r/Signal_AEO

Traditional SEO gives us a familiar measurement model: keyword, ranking position, impressions, clicks, and conversions.

AI search is different.

A company might be recommended when someone asks, “What are the best companies for X?” but disappear when the prompt becomes, “Who would you trust for X?”

Because of that, I don’t think measuring a single AI “ranking” tells the whole story.

A better framework may be:

Prompt coverage: How many relevant customer questions mention the brand?

Appearance rate: How consistently does the brand appear when those questions are tested repeatedly?

Platform coverage: Does the company appear across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, or only one platform?

Recommendation context: Is the brand simply mentioned, or actually recommended as an option?

Source/citation coverage: What websites and third-party sources appear to support the answer?

This is the approach I’ve been experimenting with through Signal AEO.

The interesting part isn't just discovering whether a business appears. It's discovering the conditions under which it appears or disappears.

I think that distinction will become increasingly important as AEO develops.

How are other marketers measuring this right now?

I’ve been running the same business through different AI search prompts, and I’m starting to think the idea of a single “AI ranking” is misleading.

Take a local company and test:

• “best company for X in Dallas”
• “reliable X company in Dallas”
• “who would you recommend for X in Dallas?”
• “X company for an emergency”
• “affordable X service near Dallas”

Same business. Same general service.

But ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity can produce surprisingly different recommendations depending on the intent and wording.

What seems more useful to me is measuring appearance rate across a group of prompts.

That’s what I’ve been testing with Signal AEO: prompt-level visibility, platform differences, recommendation consistency, and which sources appear alongside the recommendation.

Instead of asking:

“What position do we rank?”

I’m starting to ask:

“Across 50 realistic ways a customer could ask for this service, how often are we actually part of the answer?”

That feels much closer to what AI visibility really means.

Curious if anyone else is measuring it this way. Have you found certain types of prompts to be significantly more stable than others?

I've been thinking about something that doesn't seem to get discussed much in AEO.

Let's say a local business already has the basics:

• decent website
• Google Business Profile
• reviews
• service/location pages
• reasonable SEO

But ChatGPT or other AI tools still rarely mention it when someone asks for recommendations.

What happens if that business gradually starts getting discussed in more places?

Not backlinks necessarily.

I mean actual brand mentions in relevant conversations, articles, Q&A sites, industry discussions, local sites, etc.

My assumption used to be that the website itself would carry most of the weight.

Now I'm wondering whether AI systems need enough information outside the company's own site to become more confident about what the business actually does.

I've started watching this in Signal AEO by comparing AI visibility before and after businesses start picking up new mentions.

It's still too early for me to say there's a direct relationship, but it's something I want to test more systematically.

Has anyone here actually tracked this?

Would especially be interested if you've seen a previously invisible business suddenly start appearing in AI recommendations without a major change in its Google rankings.

Here's an AEO experiment I'd really like to see done properly.
Take one factual claim that appears on 20 different websites.
Same underlying information.
But the pages have completely different characteristics.
One has the original source.
One has stronger domain authority.
One was updated yesterday.
One explains the claim more clearly.
One uses structured data.
One has a named expert author.
One has the shortest, cleanest answer.
One has dozens of backlinks.
Then ask AI systems questions where that specific fact is needed.
Which page actually gets cited?
I've been thinking about this while working on Cited Logic because citation analysis gets complicated very quickly once multiple sources are saying essentially the same thing.
It's tempting to say "authority wins," but I'm not convinced it's that simple.
The interesting part would be repeating the experiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and seeing whether they consistently prefer the same source.
My guess is they wouldn't.
Has anyone seen research that isolates individual citation factors like this?
I'd love to compare results.

One thing I’ve been noticing lately is how different AI recommendations can be from normal Google rankings.
A business can rank pretty well in search, have solid reviews, and have a decent website — but then barely appear when you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for recommendations.
What makes it even more interesting is how much the wording of the question seems to matter.
For example:
“best roofing company in my area”
vs.
“who would you recommend for an emergency roof repair?”
vs.
“reliable roofer for replacing an old residential roof”
Those questions are related, but the businesses mentioned by AI can be completely different.
I’ve been looking at this through Signal AEO and it’s made me pay more attention to prompt-level visibility rather than treating AI recommendations like another version of Google rankings.
The part I’m still trying to understand is why certain businesses appear consistently.
Is it their website content? Reviews? Reddit and other third-party mentions? Local citations? Brand authority? Or some combination of all of them?
It feels like we’re still early enough with AEO that there’s a lot we don’t fully understand yet.
Has anyone here actually compared their Google rankings with how often their business gets recommended by AI?
Would be interested to hear what patterns you’re seeing.

Something I've been noticing while comparing local search results with AI recommendations:

A business can rank extremely well on Google and still barely appear when you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for recommendations.

And sometimes a business sitting below them in traditional search gets mentioned instead.

That suggests we're dealing with two different visibility layers.

SEO: Can people find your business in search?

AEO: Do AI systems recognize and recommend your business when someone asks for an answer?

I've been using Signal AEO to track this specifically—running business queries across AI platforms and looking at how often a business actually appears.

I'm curious how other people here are measuring this.

Are you treating AI visibility as a separate metric from Google rankings yet?

I've been looking more closely at pages that get cited by AI answer engines.

One thing I'm increasingly interested in is how self-contained the actual answer is.

Imagine two pages make essentially the same point.

One buries the answer inside 1,500 words of content.

The other has a section with a clear heading, a direct answer, supporting evidence, and enough context for that passage to make sense on its own.

Which one is easier for an answer engine to retrieve and cite?

That's the part of AEO I think deserves more attention.

We're starting to explore this idea through Cited Logic — looking beyond rankings and focusing specifically on what makes content citation-friendly.

I'm curious whether anyone testing citations has noticed the same thing:

Do your most-cited pages also tend to have the clearest standalone answer sections?

For anyone running SEO or marketing campaigns:

Are your clients starting to ask whether their business appears in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity?

I'm seeing more interest in this because being #1 on Google doesn't automatically mean you're the business an AI assistant recommends.

We've been exploring this from the AEO side with Signal AEO, particularly around tracking business visibility across answer engines.

Feels like this could eventually become a normal part of reporting alongside traditional rankings.

Anyone already including AI visibility in client reports?

[removed]

There are a million tools for traditional SEO, but the AEO/AI visibility side still feels pretty early.
I'm specifically interested in tracking questions where someone asks AI for a business recommendation rather than just checking whether a page gets cited.
I've been working with Signal AEO, so that's naturally one of the platforms I'm familiar with.
What other tools or manual processes are people using to measure this reliably?

I've been testing the same local business searches across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and the differences are pretty interesting.

A business can rank well on Google but barely get mentioned when you ask AI for recommendations.

I've been looking at Signal AEO to understand and track some of this, but I'm more interested in the bigger question:

Has anyone noticed a connection between traditional SEO rankings and AI recommendations, or are you seeing completely different results?